


keep your heart close (to the ground)

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War I, Angst, Awkward Period Romance, Drama, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nurse MacKenzie, Patient Will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 11:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5926759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like so many upper middle class girls before her, she signed up thinking that the war would be a splendid adventure. Three years later, MacKenzie has learned that it is most definitely not. Especially for the brokenhearted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep your heart close (to the ground)

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** So this is... very much unlike anything I've written before. I typically shy away from this sort of AU out of fear that by removing the characters so far from their original circumstances that I've ceased to write the characters at all and am not doing them any sort of justice. But a lot of people encouraged me to follow up on this idea that I had while binge watching the miniseries _Anzac Girls_ while incredibly sick about a week ago. I have a degree in history, as some of you may know. While WWI is technically outside of my focus, I have studied it at the collegiate level and on a personal level, my great-grandfather having served in France during WWI as both a combat fighter and General Pershing's bodyguard before going on to be in the first class of the Air Force. That being said, I have taken some license with some historical facts (and French geography, probably, since geography is not my strong suit) in order to make the fic accessible to non-historians. 
> 
> So I do hope that you enjoy this! Because I'm already having a panic attack and I haven't even hit post yet!

_waves crash along_  
_the battered, lonely lighthouse_  
_tomorrow she's gone_  
_and if not, someday somehow_  
_are these hands a waste?_  
_well this side of mortality is_  
_scaring me to death_

 

* * *

 

 Later on, she realizes that this all occurred on the third anniversary of her arrival in France with the British Red Cross. She’s come a ways from working in French hospitals staffed by volunteers and functioning solely on prayers and clever supply drivers — it is her third month at the 1st American Field Hospital and Ambulance Corps, but her tenth month total serving in the Army Nurse Corps, and were it not for a write up among the British ranks for her meritorious service at the Battle of Cambrai six months ago, her parents would still be unaware of where their runaway daughter had gotten to after enlisting, like so many upper middle class girls before her, secretly while visiting family in London and with the idea of going off to have a splendid adventure.

But war is not splendid.

Especially for the brokenhearted.

It does, however, serve as a splendid distraction for one’s brokenheartedness. Only Sister Sabbith, who sleeps in the bunk next to her, knows about the letters and photographs that she keeps hidden away under her mattress. Sister Sabbith, and perhaps Matron Lansing, who often slips Mr. Keefer’s rotgut into her coffee for her and on the occasions that she has been visited by Colonel Skinner, a dash of verified French bourbon.

The war on the Western Front, in both the trenches and field hospitals, is marked by long intervals of quiet anxiety alternating with moments of bloody panic, with the former being miserable and the latter being the sort of distraction that Sister McHale thrives on.

This is one of those moments of bloody panic.

Bells in the steeple of the nearby church clang riotously, signaling the arrival of a convoy from the Casualty Clearing Station. The hem of her grey dress is already six inches deep in mud from her exertions this morning, helping the orderlies remove stretcher after stretcher from the ambulances and carry the patients safely across walkways to the wards through the rain. The new arrivals are all too frequent this week, all from the Somme Valley. Each man ferrying the same message — the Germans are advancing the line.

MacKenzie has moments where she misses the crisp blue of her Red Cross uniform, but this is not one of those moments. Soon she will be up to her elbows in surgical sleeves and blood.

The first man put in front of her is half dead from the long, weary hours and bumpy dirt roads between the CCS and the hospital. Her fingers still damp from washing, she lifts the cardboard tag pinned to his chest cataloging his injuries. It’s damp, the blood seeping out from his uniform and the rain causing the ink to run. Mac squints, before sliding a hand into the hole in the Private’s jacket — gunshot wound to the shoulder. She rolls him over, as gently as she can. No exit wound.

She prepares him to be transported to surgery.

The next man has a German bayonet still embedded in his hand, and she helps him swallow the morphine before calling Sloan over to restrain him as she removes the weapon from his palm, and then dresses and bandages the wound. The Specialist she tends to after that is bleeding from his left ear, and she doesn’t have to look at his tag to diagnosis a tympanic membrane perforation. She only sees at least two or three a day.

The ward is humid and cramped, the warped window panes dotted with condensation. The whole room smells of stale blood and the rot of flesh. Too many nurses and too many doctors and too many patients; breathing deeply, she washes the blood from hands in a clean basin.

Rolling her head backwards, then side to side, she approaches the next bed.

She reaches for his tag, yelping when the soldier jerks and clamps his hand around her wrist. It’s only then that she recognizes the soot-faced man she is set to treat.

“Wi — Captain McAvoy!”

“Major,” he corrects, voice nearly a snarl.

Her heart stutters a beat, and then drops into her stomach. “Oh. I see.”

A moment too late, she notices the golden insignia on his epaulets. To be perfectly honest, she notices a _few_ things just a moment too late. Most recently, the oak leaf on Will’s uniform. And the fact that the uniform in question was _on Will,_ who is covered in grime and dirt and blood.

Who she hasn’t seen since he turned away from her that night some five months ago in Amiens after she answered his marriage proposal with the information that she hadn’t formally broken off her attachment to Brian until four months into their own courtship. His face shuttered, joy and something she thinks to this day might have been the last bit of optimism he had left dissolving into a hardened impersonal mask.

He was near unrecognizable to her that night, and he’s near unrecognizable to her now.

“Please, let me.” Her hand is still immobilized by his; she looks to him for permission to touch him, to look at the tag, to do _something_ for him.

Swallowing hard, he unfurls his fingers from around her wrist one at a time, releasing the tension in his shoulder and settling back against the pillow. “We were retreating back behind the line when they dropped mortar on my company. I took shrapnel to my legs. Apparently, some of it is close to an artery, or something.”

Frowning, she reads his vitals when they were taken by the triage nurse. She puts her index and middle fingers over the pulse on his throat, and bites her lip. His heart rate is even faster than it was a few hours ago, a clear indication of substantive trauma.

Or rather, substantive pain.

“Yes, your femoral artery,” she murmurs, reading the rest of his prognosis, her eyes half on the oak tag and half on his face. Under the shoals of gunpowder and muck, his complexion is unnaturally pale. “You’re quite lucky. Had it sliced it open, you’d have bled out in seconds.”

“I’d have been luckier if it’d hit it, then.”

She balks. “Wi — Major.”

“Can I get a different nurse?” he asks, eyes narrowing.

Steeling her rattled nerves, which were rattled since the morning when she couldn’t stop a PFC from losing quarts of blood between her fingers out of his thoracic cavity but are truly humming and vibrating now, she pulls a stool to his bedside and places herself on top of it.

“We’re all a bit busy here, Major. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, for the time being. Unless you’d like for me cut a vein open and have you transferred to the operating suite?”

Will’s face contorts into a grimace. “No thank you.”

Almost as if on cue, Jim appears at her side with a tray of surgical implements, a thick syringe of what she knows to be saline, and a solution of morphine strong enough to tranquilize a horse — which is just fine, because at over six feet tall, Will is a giant among men. If his law degree hadn’t been enough to convince the recruiters of his intellect and aptitude for officer training, his height would have done it.

Trying to quell the tremulous sensation in her belly, she hands him the tin cup.

“Drink.”

He eyes it distrustfully. “What is it?”

“Poison.” Rolling her eyes, she forces it into his hand and braces a hand under his shoulder, pulling him up from the pillow so he might swallow without choking. “It’s morphine, you dolt. Drink it, and I’ll start fixing up your leg.”

Looking at her warily, he raises the cup to his lips, and then drinks the medicine not unlike the way one drinks rotgut. MacKenzie has never had occasion to need morphine herself, and thinks that if she ever did, she would insist on the syringes the field medics carry even if she does wonder about how sanitary a needle in a metal case can be.

Huffing a weary sigh, he slumps bonelessly down onto the rigid hospital bed. Her mouth tastes of bitter adrenaline, and she swallows it down as she watches him settle. Features more relaxed now, she notices how hollow and gaunt his face has become since she saw him last.

But she focuses on the task at hand, her gentle fingers pulling back the fabric of his shredded trousers to reveal his wounds.

This should feel clinical. She is just a nurse examining her patient. But it hardly feels clinical at all, and at any moment she expects Will to snap at her to get her hands off him. Her own pulse leaping and bounding, she decides she might as well make facing his ire worth it.

“Did you receive any of my letters and telegrams, or did they get lost in the post?”

“I got them,” he answers shortly.

“Oh.”

“I just didn’t read them.” he continues. “Good for keeping us warm during the trenches at night, though.”

“You _burned_ them?” Her hand freezes where it’s palpating his thigh; she feels like she’s going to be sick. “Well, I suppose — bully for you, then. Not that I expected — what I mean is, you had every right.”

“I know.”

Will looks at her like she’s intolerably stupid.

Her fingers locate a large piece of debris through the thick surges of blood emitting from his leg. With her unoccupied hand, she selects the hemostat off the tray and clamps down on the piece of jagged metal with it before reaching for the tray again, this time selecting her scissors — his trousers need to be removed.

With a mere glance, she asks Jim to assist her. Will is displeased, however, by the involvement of another person in his care.

“Please lie still. I would really rather not open your femoral artery right here.” Her glare results in him dropping from his elbows and back down onto the bed.

“I’m debating if that’d be better or worse than going back to Nebraska.”

“They wouldn’t ship you home for this, Major,” she says almost cheerfully, carefully releasing her hold of the clamp to Jim as she cuts away the fabric of his uniform pants, gently peeling back the wool where dried blood has matted it to his thigh. “You should see the sorts of injuries we’re forced to treat just for the men to be sent back to the front lines in a week or two.”

Even with the aid of saline to rehydrate the blood, she tears off what amounts to a sizeable patch of leg hair, and he hisses.

“They’d be better off dead at your hands.”

“You don’t mean that.” Her eyes widen, and she looks up from her work.

Jim, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her, is startled as well. Satisfied with the visual field of his injuries, she replaces Jim’s hand with her own on the hemostat, dismissing him as silently as she requested his help.

“Do you know how many men I’ve sent off to die since I was promoted?” His voice is half brittle with bitterness, half wistful. Face tensed as he tries to endure the discomfort of treatment, he stares straight up at the ward’s steepled ceiling. His eyes are single points of brightness, two blue lights among drab olive green and grey and the dark wooden walls. “Not that I can even keep count anymore — two hundred and seventeen. And that’s not counting yesterday. God only knows how many more, how many more letters I’ll write. And for what? So the monarchs of Europe can play at war like we’re toy soldiers, and so the American businessmen, these _great_ men of industry like Carnegie and Vanderbilt can turn a profit?”

“Even if that’s the case—”

“It _is_ the case, you know it,” he counters. “What is the goddamn point in this war?”

“I don’t know. But I think you and I both know the point in our place in it.”

“Oh please.”

“How many men have you kept alive?” she asks, reminding herself to be gentle. She wonders how many days he’s been awake, how long he laid on the ground on a canvas stretcher waiting to be triaged, how long he suffered in the back of the ambulance.

All of that, after the hell of battle.

But _by_ God is she a little angry at him right now.

Will snorts, lifting a dirty hand to scrub at his equally dirty face. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you wish it had.”

“Cynicism, so deep. I said stop moving.” Her chastisement is dulled by a metal basin clattering to the floor on the opposite side of the room, Sister Sabbith and Marguerite sliding around the other nurses and doctors to aid Dr. Halliday with a seizing patient. Mac takes a deep breath. “I am trying to keep you alive, would you stop moving before I ask an orderly to strap you down?”

But it’s as if Will didn’t hear her.

“America, the greatest country in the world,” he mutters.

She thinks of the recruitment poster Jim tore down from the bulletin board in his hometown’s post office to hang above his bed in barracks. _The call of Duty for Home and Country. Enlist Now!_ The impeccable, trumpeting soldier bathed in stars and spangles. _To fight in France for Freedom,_ in red, white, and blue. _Fight for America, the Greatest Country in the World._

This war has lived up to no one’s expectations. She’s been here for three years, but she knows the ideals that were poured into Jim and Don’s heads in basic — now that the American boys were coming, the war would be tied up in five minutes flat as soon as their boots landed on French soil.

“It’s not,” she says. “But it can be.”

There may not be much she still believes in, but she thinks she still believes in _that._

“What makes America so great?” he asks, tone taking a definitively sarcastic pitch.

 _You do._ But Will burned all of her attempts to write to him — MacKenzie knows that if she spoke those words aloud she would be in the receiving end of red-hot verbal lashing. She burns in her own way now, small flames of anger and irritation feeding her growing temper.

“What about the boy three beds down who kept fighting after a German lanced his hand with the end of his bayonet, who fought so hard he took the gun out of the German’s hands and fired long and true enough to save his entire platoon and a platoon of French soldiers?” she asks, staring fixedly at his leg, pulling out piece after piece of shrapnel with quick, clever movements of her hands. “What about the ambulance drivers who navigate the front lines to collect the wounded who aren’t even protected by the red cross they wear? What about _you_ — a country lawyer from Nebraska who enlisted before war was formally declared, so that his brother wouldn’t and so his mother and sisters might have something to live on?”

He seethes. “Don’t you dare bring my—”

“Be quiet.” Her voice seems to crackle. “Mr. Harper, more saline please.”

As if out of thin air, Jim appears at her side with another syringe of boiled water. She folds her fingers around the glass; it’s still warm, but not unbearably so. Will can suffer through it.

For the first time, Will recognizes Jim’s presence. “Who is he and why are you letting him near my leg?”

Shifting between his feet and holding a lacquered metal bowl filled with bloody shards of explosive, Jim casts his glance back and forth between them. Mac lifts her brows towards her fringe, watching him expectantly.

“She trusts me.”

Mac sighs, closing her eyes.

For the first time showing some animation to his soul beyond dull and sardonic anger, Will barks a true and hale laugh. “Oh boy, was that the wrong thing to say. I don’t trust her worth—”

Fumbling her free hand to her left, she reaches for the pile of surgical cloths on the stand at the end of the bed. Finding one that still feels damp between her fingers, she yanks it away from the stack and shoves it into Will’s open mouth.

His eyes glaze over.

Within moments he’s asleep.

Jim frowns, tentatively approaching Mac. “What was that?”

“Ether.”

“Are you allowed to do that?”

“No,” she answers simply, pulling the rag out of Will’s mouth and turning his head to the side in event of emesis. Then, casting a nonplussed expression across her face, she looks back to Jim. “Now if you would, hold the limb steady.”

Seeing no reason to protest, he complies.

 

* * *

 

Kerosene is rationed, so at night the trauma ward is lit by candlelight. Her boots scuff against the rough-hewn floorboards as she walks up and down the rows, her hand cupping the flame of her candle as she takes vitals and tests fevers and pulses, applies bismuth iodoform paraffin paste to wounds and changes bandages. In the corner sits steadfast Marguerite, chewing on the end of her blonde braid as she grinds linseed for poultices. Jim, next to her, plays an endless game of solitaire. Their conversation is too low to be heard, but Mac presumes that her presence is the only remotely proper thing about it.

Not that her presence here tonight is entirely proper, either — she asked Sloan to swap night duty shifts with her.

Satisfied with her care for the rest of her patients, she rounds back to Will’s bed. He hasn’t woken in the four or so hours since she drugged him, and what with the orderlies having been quite preoccupied with assisting with compound fractures and head wounds, he remains stock-still atop the sheets in his shredded uniform.

With a fever.

With a measured sigh, she sits on the edge of his cot. Her touch careful and light, she lifts his bandages to examine the shrapnel wounds. Not daring to move the flame of her candle more than a few inches from his skin, she squints into the dim glow to assess if his injuries require debridement.

His skin is still swollen, and pinkened, but the torn flesh looks clean and not aggravated in the way infection crinkles and yellows the edges of lacerations. And fever is to be expected, after such a trauma.

Still, she reaches into the stand next to his cot for a tin of paraffin paste to re-apply to the skin before replacing his bandages with clean ones. She places her candle next to the basin of clean well water and laundered rags on top of the stand, and sets to her task. Taking longer than it calls for — she hasn’t touched him in months, but it feels like starving, aching years in the hourglass in her heart — her fingers are massaging a particularly deep cut in his quadriceps when he stirs.

“Did they cut my leg off?”  

Concealing a discerning smile against her shoulder, she squeezes her hand around his thigh, softly.

“Oh.”

“I wouldn’t have let them take your leg,” she says, just as softly. “If it had come to it. Just minor wounds.”

His eyes are glazed and unfocused. “Oh. I feel…”

“Floaty, is a common word used.” Next, she gets the camphor for the contusions. “Though a somewhat worrisome, when one considers vertigo. But it would explain all the vomit I clean up — it’s the morphine I gave you earlier.”

He takes a deep breath, and releases it slowly.

“It’s nice.”

Smiling again — but not bothering to hide it this time — she maps the topography of his bruises. Without consent from her conscious mind, the pad of her index finger finds an old scar on the tensor from when he fell off a moving tractor as a boy.

“Don’t get too used to it,” she warns him, droll. “We’ll be weaning you off tomorrow.”

“How long was I asleep?” he asks, brow furrowing.

 _Asleep_.

Yes.

MacKenzie clears her throat before removing the battered gold watch hanging from the belt cinching the waist of her grey, simply-cut dress. “It’s just about twenty hundred hours.”

Humming, he lets his eyes fall shut. Then he opens them again, rolling his head on his pillow to look at her.

“I don’t know what time I got here.”

“Your convoy arrived a bit before sixteen hundred hours,” she murmurs, and then notices the beads of sweat dotting his forehead. “Do you feel warm?”

He blinks slowly. “I’m cold.”

“You have a bit of a fever. Nothing particularly concerning, but I’m keeping an eye on you.” Putting the camphor and paraffin back onto the bed stand, she sits up closer towards his head. Someone — Marguerite, she suspects — did a fair job of cleaning the dirt from his face and hands, but his hair is turned nearly charcoal in places from grime. Her hand still behaving as if it were not under the command of her brain, her palm smooths over his chest to his tattered shirt collar. “I’ll bring you some clean clothes so you can change out of that uniform. I’ll that the quartermaster requisitions you some new trousers, at the least. The jacket may be salvaged.”

Nodding, Will slowly sits up, only managing it with her aid.

In the time that it takes for her locate a clean undershirt, cotton shorts, and one of the last pairs of knit socks from a New York women’s society, and return, he’s only managed to remove his jacket and button down. Seeing, he seems to reawaken from a daze, and leans down to tug at the mud-crusted laces of his boots and the tightly-wrapped linen around his calves.

He pales rapidly, and sits back up.

“I think I’m getting that floaty feeling,” he mutters, swaying.

Hastening her steps, she arrives at his cot and kneels on the floor to retrieve the metal bedpan under it. Mac drops the clothes up by his pillow and holds the pan under his mouth as he retches. There’s not much in his stomach but water, but it all comes up.

Eventually, it stops, and he moans and leans into her side.

“Damn.”

“It’s all right, it’s what they give us the aprons for,” she whispers, making sure that he can sit up on his own before standing again to find a towel to cover the top of the pan — and hands it off to _Jim_ to scour and clean. “Here, let me,” she says. “Just sit.”  

She hands him a cup of water.

Collecting her petticoat under her knees, she kneels on the floor in front of him. The patient behind her rouses momentarily, and then falls back asleep.

Will watches her, his face blank, as she picks apart his bootlaces before unwrapping the stiff linens. Then off come his boots, with more effort than she’d like to admit. Her nose wrinkles at the state of his socks, deciding that in the morning she’ll throw them into the fire pit and that he’ll soak his feet in warm water and Epsom salt.

“I was mean to you. Before,” he says, turning his head — out of embarrassment, perhaps — when her hands move to remove his belt and unfasten his wool trousers. But she’s cut so many pairs of pants off of so many men, bared skin and private areas hardly faze her anymore.

Still, she makes sure that Marguerite is engaged with her duties before she removes his trousers and underthings.

“Well, you have a good reason to be, I suppose,” she says lightly, watching his reaction as she helps him into the shorts. Then she staggers to her feet on her stiff, tired, working-a-triple-shift legs. “Though I won’t complain if you decide to be nicer.”

Not allowing him to respond, she cuts off whatever reply he may have by tugging his shirt up and over his head.

His chest and stomach are peppered with bruises, deep purple welts fringed with yellow and green. Shrapnel, stopped by the virtue of the thick wool of winter uniform jacket. Scarcely able to breathe, MacKenzie turns to lean over the basin of clean water on the bed stand, busying herself with soaking and wringing and soaking and wringing a clean rag.

Worrying her lower lip between her teeth, she sponges his chest and upper arms.

“When was the last time you were able to bathe?”

He groans.

Stooping, she reaches to clean his back. Rather than turn the water black by wringing out the rag, she reaches for a new one, and wets it. The hospital has been out of the soft lanolin soap for weeks, so she adds a few drops of Lysol to the water, mixing it with her pointer finger.

The lines on his face and neck are filled with filth. Gulping down the hard lump in her throat, she places a tender hand on his cheek, bracing his head as she begins to scrub away the muck and grime until his skin is red and his hair shines gold.

Will’s eyes flutter closed.

She doesn’t know if it’s because of the medicine or the fever or if he truly feels so weak, but she will not complain that he’s allowing her to do this.

The rag in her hand becomes muddied too. Then the next, before her standards are appeased, and she helps Will get the bleached crewneck over his head and his arms through the sleeves. Then she backs away, looking down at the bandages on his legs, remembering the piece of shell almost 4 inches long and 2 inches wide that she removed from his thigh just a few hours ago.

She places the rags in the basin, and collects both into her arms.

He reaches out with a tired hand, one that splays its fingers towards her for a second, and then falls limp and exhausted into his lap.

“You can stay, you know.”

Almost mechanical in her actions, she places the basin back onto the bed stand.

“Well, I am the chief nurse of this ward, so I don’t _exactly_ require your permission. But thank you,” she says. Stepping around his knees, she picks up his pillow and flips it over, punches it back into shape. Then she pulls back his blankets. “Lie back down.”

It takes their combined efforts to get his feet between the sheets.

“I should thank you. For saving my leg,” he says, once he’s prone.

Mac hears someone moving behind her. Looking back over her shoulder, she sees Marguerite taking the dirty water and replacing it with clean, and washcloths from the laundry. She murmurs her thanks, and dampens and cloth in the cool water, fresh from the well.

“It really wasn’t in any danger,” she tells him.

A crooked smile teases an appearance on his face. “The Kaiser’s men did a hack job, then?”

“It would appear,” she deadpans, and then presses the cloth to his forehead, then his cheeks, and his neck. “How does that feel? You know, you’re going to have to listen to me until the doctor decides you’re back to being fighting fit. I own you now, McAvoy.”

For a week, she thinks. Then he’ll be gone again. Worry boils in her stomach — will she ever hear from him again? See him again?

His smile shapes into a smirk. “Definitely not.”

“Oh really?” She continues pressing the cool cloth to his face. “Because you’re purring like a tomcat who got the cream right now.”

“I am definitely not.”

Mouth gaping open in protest, the beginnings of a rant start formulating on the tip of his tongue. Rolling her eyes, Mac places her fingers under his chin, and closes his great maw. “It’s for your own health.”

She punctuates her statement by wringing the cloth out into his eyes.

“Ah—”

“Say it.”

He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like _I outrank you._

“What was that?”

“You own me.”

Sighing, he closes his eyes. Mac wrings out the cloth, and dips it back into the water, wrings it out again. Not knowing what sort of tender expression she wears on her features now that his eyes are closed, she continues to sit at his bedside, bathing his face.

“Good, now go to sleep.”

She sits there, even long after he enters slumber.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
